Course Listing

Fundamental concepts and formalisms of conservation of energy and increase of entropy as applied to natural and engineered environmental and biological systems. In addition to lectures, pedagogical approach includes real-world observations and applications through student presentations and projects.

The course provides an overview of Earth’s energy resources, with emphasize on the factors that control their global distributions and uses in our society. Lectures and labs will emphasize methods used to identify and exploit resources, as well as the environmental impact of these operations. Topics include: coal and acid rain; oil & natural gas, photochemical smog, oil spills; unconventional fossil resources (shale gas, tar sands); greenhouse gas emissions and climate; nuclear power and radioactive hazards; solar, hydroelectric, tidal, and geothermal power; energy storage (methane, hydrogen); and key materials (rare earth metals, lithium) required for the energy transition. Labs will emphasize datasets and tools (drilling methods, satellite remote sensing data, and subsurface imaging techniques) for discovering and developing resources, and assessing and mitigating environmental impacts. 

This course will examine the theory and practical application of environmental chemistry and toxicology for assessing the behavior, toxicity and human health risks of chemical contaminants in the environment. The goals of the course are to: (a) illustrate how various sub-disciplines in environmental toxicology are integrated to understand the behavior of pollutants; (b) demonstrate how scientific information is applied to inform environmental management decisions and public policy through several case studies; and (c) provide an introduction to the legislative framework in which environmental toxicology is conducted. This course will be directed toward undergraduate students with a basic understanding of chemistry and calculus and an interest in applied science and engineering to address environmental management problems.

ESE/EPS 166 engages the new Harvard Climate Observatory that will fundamentally herald a new era in both climate research and the development of strategic approaches to advancing the climate impact on public policy. The central objective of the New Climate Observatory is to address this problem by introducing, for the first time, the development of a new generation of innovative technology that takes explicit advantage of recent major advances in Harvard-based instruments and optical designs in combination with advanced solar powered stratospheric aeronautical design. The new solar powered stratospheric aircraft that together constitute the Climate Observatory engage multiple recent design innovations in photovoltaics, energy storage, as well as guidance and control. Together these enable a combination of long duration solar powered observing systems, each targeted at the highest priority risk factors that threaten global societal stability. The resulting observations will, for the first time, provide the irrefutable evidence needed for quantitative forecasts of the dominant risk factors stemming from the global use of fossil fuels.

While satellites have for years dominated the federal climate programs, for the purpose of developing tested and trusted quantitative forecasts of risk, satellites engender significant disadvantages. In sharp contrast to satellite systems, the new Harvard Climate Observatory provides, for the first time, orders of magnitude improvement in spatial and temporal resolution observations. ESE/EPS 166 will focus explicitly on this new generation of climate observations, forecasting, and resulting advances in public policy. An important part of the course is the display of Harvard flight instruments in the laboratory and the strategy for addressing unsolved scientific problems with new instrumentation.